Users often provide feedback regarding products, services, software elements, or hardware elements through various means. In some instances, the feedback relates to bugs, problems, or other issues with the software or hardware, while in other instances the feedback relates to asking questions, reporting experiences (e.g., positive/negative feedback), or providing suggestions for improving the software or hardware. In further instances, the feedback includes text or other information, such as a general description about how the software or hardware works, a feature that a user likes or dislikes, information that is not related to the software or hardware, and so on. For example, a user might use a support interface provided by an operating system to let an administrator know about features that the user likes and problems that the user is having with a particular feature of the operating system. Users also often provide responses to their feedback items, and engage in dialog with technical-support personnel, e.g., via online services. Such dialog can be conducted, e.g., to resolve problems.
In many instances, the feedback is manually viewed and evaluated by administrators (or other people associated with the service, software, or hardware) to identify bugs or other issues with the service, software, or hardware that need fixing. Since the feedback is manually evaluated, and often recorded in a user terminology which is different from terminology used by administrators. In some instances, the feedback encompasses multiple different types of information (which may or may not be applicable to the administrators or others reviewing the feedback), the administrators spend considerable time analyzing the feedback. Moreover, some systems designed to assist administrators in reviewing suggestions are unable to correctly process unknown terms, such as the names of recently-released products. Since user feedback often accompanies product releases, this greatly limits the usefulness of such systems to administrators. Furthermore, some systems designed to assist administrators in reviewing feedback are inaccurate and/or are unable to infer feedback based on granularity levels that are appropriate for the intended purpose. Again, such shortcomings greatly limit the usefulness of such systems to administrators.